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Post #12: In which I ask for help naming something

I’m searching for a name for an experience I have and it’s likely that others have it too.

It’s that moment when I learn something again, and somehow this time it means something more than before.

I’m not talking about the third time my jacket gets caught on my bag and I finally decide to fix it. Nor, is it when the critical part of me says, “You here, again? Again?” when I repeat a pattern that lands me in emotional pain.

No, this moment, the one I don’t have a name for (yet), could come as a result of working through those situations, but it isn’t the same. Not the same. No.

When this moment happens, it’s as if something shifts, gets deeper, wider, more intricate yet simultaneously, clearer. I thought I knew, but I didn’t know this about x, or I didn’t know x like this. Are you there with me? And across the span of that split second, I go from what I didn’t even know I experienced as a limit of understanding of x to –> more. There’s a physical sensation to it and some wonder too. I’m here again, in the same room, but the blue walls are bluer, the room is bigger and maybe there are books on the shelves that I didn’t see before – and the changes feel so, well, obvious. Of course, x is this.

Believe me, I’ve tried on a bunch of words. None satisfy. They either describe the result – like understanding, wisdom, or clarity. Or, they describe the sense of surprise like “Aha!” But none give justice to the nanosecond of crossing over, going down deeper, or expanding from what is now x as I know it, into the newer shinier x that is the x of before transformed.

I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re going to have to invent a new word.